1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of electronic design automation systems for designing and characterizing integrated circuits. More specifically, the present invention relates to an effective modeling method and data structure for modeling signal propagation delay of a timing arc of an integrated circuit cell.
2. Related Art
The rapid growth of the complexity of modern electronic circuits has forced electronic circuit designers to rely upon computer programs to assist and automate most steps of the circuit design process. Typical circuits today contain hundreds of thousands or millions of individual pieces or “cells.” Such a design is much too large for a circuit designer or even an engineering team of designers to manage effectively manually. To automate the circuit design and fabrication of integrated circuit devices, electronic design automation (EDA) systems have been developed.
An EDA system is a computer software system designers use for designing integrated circuit (IC) devices. The EDA system typically receives one or more high level behavioral descriptions of an IC device (e.g., in HDL languages like VHDL, Verilog, etc.) and translates this high level design language description into netlists of various levels of abstraction. At a higher level of abstraction, a generic netlist is typically produced based on technology independent primitives. The generic netlist can be translated by the EDA system into a lower level technology-specific netlist based on a technology-specific library that has gate-specific models for timing and power estimation. A netlist describes the IC design and is composed of nodes (elements) and edges, e.g., connections between nodes, and can be represented using a directed cyclic graph structure having nodes which are connected to each other with signal lines. The netlist is typically stored in computer readable media within the EDA system and processed and verified using many well known techniques. One result is a physical device layout in mask form which can be used to directly implement structures in silicon to realize the physical IC device.
More specifically, within a typical EDA system, the circuit designer first produces a high-level description of the circuit in a hardware description language such as Verilog or VHDL. This high-level description is converted into a netlist using a computer implemented synthesis process such as the “Design Compiler” by Synopsys of Mountain View, Calif. A netlist is a description of the electronic circuit which specifies what cells compose the circuit and which pins of which cells are to be connected together using wires (“nets”). Importantly, the netlist does not specify where on a circuit board or silicon chip the cells are placed or where the wires run which connect them together. Determining this geometric information is the function of a computer controlled placement process and a computer controlled routing process.
The placement process finds a location for each cell on a circuit board or silicon chip. The locations are specified, typically, in two dimensional spatial coordinates, e.g., (x, y) coordinates, on the circuit board or silicon chip. The locations are typically selected to optimize certain objectives such as wire length, wire routibility, circuit speed, circuit power consumption, and/or other criteria, subject to the condition that the cells are spread evenly over the circuit board or silicon chip and that the cells do not overlap with each other. The output of the automatic computer controlled cell placement process includes a data structure including the (x, y) location for each cell of the IC design.
Next, the designer supplies the netlist and the cell location data structure, generated by the placement program, to a computer implemented automatic wire routing process (“router”). The router generates wire geometry within data structure for connecting pins together. The wire geometry data structure and cell placement data structure together are used to make the final geometric database needed for fabrication of the circuit. Routers typically include a coarse routing process and a fine routing process. The coarse router provides a general path for the routing that is done at the detail stage. The coarse router examines at the level of the whole integrated circuit chip and its available resources and determines what the rough pathways should be from a topological standpoint. The fine or detail router lays down the actual geometries and connected wire segments in the appropriate layers as a wire connection may span multiple layers. The fine router creates wire routes that are “clean,” e.g., do not have design rule violations, do not overlap other structures and can be fabricated.
The signal propagation delay (“cell delay”) through a cell (“gate”) is an important characteristic to model within an EDA system. The cell delays in a technology library are typically represented using non-linear delay models (NLDM) which are essentially look-up tables. Typically, a group of tables are supplied in the technology library for each cell, tables are designated for representing the rise and fall delays for each timing arc of the cell. These tables are typically 4-dimesional in that they accept output load and input transition time (slew) as inputs and generate delay and output slew values as outputs. These output load-based NLDMs, while providing delay values, have a disadvantage in the cell delay modeling processes that are performed early in the circuit synthesis process. For instance, during early circuit synthesis processes, the output load of the cell is not known because the cells have not yet been mapped to the target technology library and, as such, the cells are not yet connected together. Output load estimates are made in these early synthesis processes because the output load-based NLDMs need these values as inputs. Unfortunately, the output load estimates introduce inaccuracies in the overall circuit synthesis process. The output load-based NLDMs also introduce a “Catch-22” problem in that delay modeling helps to accurately map the cells, but mapping yields the true output capacitance that is then used to accurately determine the cell's delay, etc. It would be advantageous to provide a cell delay modeling system that did not require the output load of a cell as an input.
A more simplistic linear delay model has been proposed as a vehicle for efficient logic synthesis of high-performance designs. This delay model is also referred to as the constant delay model. In the constant delay model, the delay of a timing arc of a gate, τ, is represented as:τ=R·Co+p                 where                    R=output resistance,            Co=output load of the timing arc output, and            p=intrinsic delay of a gate.This relationship can also be represented as:τ=(R·Ci)·(Co/Ci)+p                         where                    Ci=input capacitance of the timing arc input.The term (R·Ci) is also referred to as the logical effort of the gate. The term (Co/Ci) is also referred to as the electrical effort or gain of the gate.                        
The constant delay model assumes that the delay of the timing arc remains constant. The reasoning for this is as follows. The intrinsic delay of the gate, p, is constant. As Co increases, the gate is implicitly upsized, so Ci increases appropriately. So, (Co/Ci) remains constant. As Ci increases, R appropriately decreases, so (R·Ci) remains constant. Consequently, τ remains constant. An important property of the constant delay model is that the delay of a timing arc is independent of load, e.g., the delay does not depend on either Co or Ci, but merely on the ratio of the two. This property is useful in early stages of logic synthesis, prior to technology dependent optimization because the actual load of a gate is unknown at that time.
However, while this simplistic delay model does have its advantages, the constant delay model does not consider several important factors when modeling the delay of a gate. For instance, the constant delay model does not consider the impact of transition times on delay, nor does it deal effectively with complex gates with different input capacitances for different input pins. The model also fails to take into consideration the impact of limited discrete sizes in the technology library nor of certain design rules like maximum capacitance and maximum transition associated with gates. By not taking into consideration the above factors, the constant delay model is not as accurate as non-linear delay models. It would be advantageous to provide a method and system for providing cell delay modeling that offered the advantageous of constant cell delay modeling but also considered the above referenced factors.